


A Real Girl

by grayimperia



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Minor Suicide Reference, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 14:45:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10220564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayimperia/pseuds/grayimperia
Summary: [Major NDRV3 Spoilers]Shirogane has a talk with Amami. It doesn’t go well.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Major spoilers for NDRV3 endgame.

When she was a little girl and wanted to fit in with all the other little children, Shirogane was told to be herself. 

She tilts her head, and her blue hair falls in ribbons over her plain face. Is that who she is? Someone plain?

When she was a little girl, she tied it up in pigtails so she could run and play and pretend to be like the other kids. 

She lifts her hand to brush it back, the mirror before her faithfully reflecting her every movement. Ah, so that’s who she is. Someone who pretends.

When her life is about to end, she takes down the pigtails.

-

Rantaro Amami is suicidally nice. He spends the entire game playing big brother to the group before unknowingly volunteering as a sacrifice for hope for the fourth time. His two fellow contestants wave goodbye to him, and for their sake he pretends like it doesn’t bother him that they’re leaving him to die. 

Shirogane is chosen to record his post-game interview before he’s decommissioned and his memories are erased. He’s just beaten the record for most killing games survived, but he doesn’t know that and she’s not allowed to tell him. 

Amami leans back in his waiting room chair and regards her through half-lidded eyes. “Have we met before?” he says as she busily fills in his information on her clipboard. 

He doesn’t sound angry about his situation or about whatever part he must knows she’s playing in it. Instead there’s a serenity about him. Shirogane looks up from her writing and he meets her gaze without the slightest bit of resentment. He’s just… watching her. She shakes her head. “No, we haven’t.”

“You sure?” he asks. “I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

Shirogane waves her hand and returns to her writing. “I just have one of those faces.” Then, for some reason, she adds. “Plain people tend to all look the same.”

“I don’t think you’re plain,” Amami says in the same clam, level voice. Then a cruel smile curls over his darkening face. “Plain people wouldn’t work for whatever sick organization you’re running here.”

She shrugs. “Well, you’re wrong.” She pushes her hair behind her ear. “Because I am plain, and I work here. Now, can you tell me how old you are?”

He pauses far too long for the question, and Shirogane can’t tell if he’s trying to search his memory or find the right words to answer. He says, “How old I really am, or how old I think I am?”

She clicks her pen. “Whichever seems like the truth.”

Amami lets out a breathless, humorless laugh. “Well that’s a loaded answer. God, I’ll go with,” he puts a hand to his chin. “Eighteen sound good to you…?”

She shouldn’t tell him her name. There’s no point. She personally is going to see the information be stripped out of his brain even if he does manage to remember it after it leaves her mouth. “Shirogane.”

He nods. “I am eighteen years old, Shirogane-san.” He smiles. “Maybe.”

-

T.V. is wonderful. T.V. is full of people and stories that are so much more than everything around her. Everyone is bright and important and they have such big, overwhelming, all-encompassing emotions that seem to swallow the world. 

None of it’s real, but the things they make her feel, the swells of pure hope and the pits of pure despair—that absolutely has to be real, even if every word that comes out of everyone’s mouth is a lie.

Shirogane said proudly when she was a little girl that she wanted to be T.V. when she grew up. 

No one understood what she meant, but on the playground with her pigtails swinging, she asked a little boy with long eyelashes if he’d want to write a story with her. 

-

“Shirogane-san?” he says while she’s writing down his latest answer. “Can I ask you a question?” 

Without looking up, “You can ask, but I don’t have to respond.”

Amami laughs. “That’s fair. How many times have I done this?”

The sound of her pen scribbling against the paper fills the room for a long moment. When he thinks she isn’t going to answer, Shirogane says, “I’m not allowed to say.”

“But it’s more than once?” he pushes.

“If you think it is,” she clicks her pen. “Then it is.”

“But if I’m wrong,” he says slowly. “That would be a lie.”

“If it was a lie,” she says. “Who would contradict you?”

He raises his eyebrows but doesn’t say another word. 

“A lie that nobody can contradict,” she continues, “becomes the truth, even if it started off as a lie.”

Amami press his lips into a tight line before saying, “Is that really what you believe, Shirogane-san?”

“It is. Now,” she says, “tell me about your talent and how it helped you in the game.”

-

Shirogane once saw a show where there were people who had their memories erased over and over again, each time being given a new personality to please whatever strange creep shelled out enough money to rent a human being. 

With all that potential—the potential to create literally anyone you wanted—Shirogane can’t help but feel disappointed that almost everyone seems to go the obvious route and asks for a human sex doll. 

She changes herself all the time—erases whatever blank slate Tsumugi Shirogane takes up—and dabbles in the life of someone else. It’s strange and easy and intoxicating to slip into the skin of someone else. She thinks she might even have a talent for it. 

But she never had that power over anyone else. 

What would she do if she could remove every truth about a person and write into their very mind whatever story she wanted? 

-

“Shirogane-san,” Amami says. “Another question, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“Can I request something for the next game? Either for you to implement or relay to someone who can?” 

It’s not too odd a request so she shrugs. “Depends what it is.”

He takes that as the go ahead. “I think… that I’m okay with dying.” He says. “I mean, I’d rather survive, but…” he runs a hand through his hair. “Don’t let me do this to myself again.” 

Shirogane stares at him. “You want me to tell someone to kill you?”

Amami shakes his head. “No, just… if I make it to the end, don’t let me sacrifice myself. Just have Monokuma or the mastermind or whoever say it’s not an option for me. The, ah, the ‘except for Rantaro Amami rule.’” He looks at her with a smile. “By the way, is that even my real name?” 

She gives him a curt nod. “It is. Would you like it changed for the next game?”

“I could name myself?”

Shirogane flips to another paper on her clipboard. “If you wanted to. We let all contestants suggest things they want for their new personalities.” She frowns. “We don’t implement all of them, obviously, but we let them get a say.”

“A say that they won’t even remember having,” he says. “Well, hell. Sure. Who do I want to be when I won’t remember who I am?”

-

She played a game where people would see their shadow selves. Their second, true selves that were made up of all the feelings and desires they suppressed. Everyone walked around with one, but, of course, only the main characters even got to properly confront theirs. 

The characters talked a lot about finding the truth and accepting their true selves and not settling for anything that wasn’t the absolute most truthful trueness that ever told the truth.

Tsumugi Shirogane looks in the mirror and thinks that she has no true self.

She looks in the mirror and thinks she absolutely has to be the reflection. 

-

“It was nice meeting you, Shirogane-san.” Amami says when she announces the interview is over. He hasn’t forgotten her name yet, but then again, she’s fairly certain he’s made a point to keep saying it over and over in their conversation. “It’s pretty rare that I get to meet someone like myself.” 

That makes her pause. “What do you mean?”

He’s fiddling with his rings, and hums, nonchalant as ever. “A blank slate. Someone who is only ever what other people want them to be.” He looks up through half-lidded eyes, that strange cruel smile creeping over his feature. “Of course, I don’t have a choice in the matter.”

Shirogane tightens her grip on the clipboard. “No, you don’t.”

“Shirogane-san, you said you were plain before, but I don’t think that’s it.” He leans his head forward. “If someone’s plain, it means there’s nothing special about them. But for you… well there’s not even anything there to describe as plain, right? There is no you.”

She stands. “Goodbye, Amami-kun.”

He offers her a small wave as she approaches the door to leave. “Goodbye, Shirogane-san. It really was nice talking with you. I hope we can meet again. Maybe in another life.” 

Shirogane closes the door, and he disappears. 

She changes her mind. Rantaro Amami is just plain suicidal. 

-

She gets to be the mastermind. She gets to pull all the strings and write all the stories and be surrounded by all the characters that are hers, hers, hers. She gets to live and die and be T.V.

Shirogane decided early on that everyone would be more dramatic, more tragic, more heroic. Her cast will be smarter, stronger, _better_ than any before. Who says a writer needs originality or a tortured soul or something other than their own obsession? 

The character she writes for herself has all the personality of a wet sponge, but these things can’t be helped. 

It also can’t be helped that when she’s asked what memories to give their returning survivor, she says, “None,” and watches them drain out as much from his brain as they possibly can. 

Shirogane takes sixteen horrifically normal people and creates fourteen beautifully, _lovingly_ crafted characters and two empty vessels, too plain to be real.

-

The shot-put drops from the vent, and Amami stares at the would-be murder weapon that just whiffed past his nose. He hears footsteps running quickly up behind him, and spins on his heel. 

He says, “Shirogane-san?” 

And she bashes his head in.

**Author's Note:**

> Long time lurker, first time poster coming out of the woodworks with a super spoilery fic. I wanted to write something about Shirogane, and I think these two could have an interesting (completely awful) dynamic.


End file.
